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With less than 10 000 members in the Linux group in Steam, and less than 10 000 votes on the Linux request in GOG, I have to wonder where the millions of Linux users are, and if there even are several 10 000 Linux gamers.

Originally Posted by Thetargos

Voted (hope it helps) and commented... We'll see. I do play games I bought from them under Linux with DosBOX and Wine

I voted a while ago and had to sign up to do it which hindered me for a while but I got over it. Most linux gamers have resigned themselves to Wine i think just so they can keep up with their friends for the latest and greatest as I did with DIII and elder scrolls there simply wasn't a Linux client replacement for them. If I had the time I would be Wine'ing Guild Wars 2.

On a positive note, xyem in the Linux request on GOG just pointed out that at the time of writing, the Linux request has 82% of the votes that the Windows 7 request has. Not bad!

Originally Posted by nightmarex

I voted a while ago and had to sign up to do it which hindered me for a while but I got over it. Most linux gamers have resigned themselves to Wine i think just so they can keep up with their friends for the latest and greatest as I did with DIII and elder scrolls there simply wasn't a Linux client replacement for them. If I had the time I would be Wine'ing Guild Wars 2.

Signing up doesn't take long and GOG's policies are more in line with those of the Linux community than Valve's are in my humble opinion. Now that these people can actually show their numbers, they don't, and the belief that there are barely any gamers on Linux will continue. Someone needs to get a hold of these people!

I don't know what is happening but I think it's great. The Linux request on GOG is now getting votes every few seconds, has gotten over 150 votes today, and has moved to being the top most voted request this week. It will soon move back into third place overall as well if this continues. Keep it up you guys. Show GOG it's worth it.

We've seen a lot more of you guys voting on this wish recently and I thought it was only fair for me to update you. Linux is a great platform, and we love how much passion you guys are showing for it here on our wishlist. We definitely know that it's one of the top things our community wants from us, but it's also really difficult to bring the GOG.com level of support and ease-of-use to the wide variety of distros that are commonly used by Linux users. If we're able to bring GOG.com games to Linux--and we're constantly evaluating ways that we can do this--we want to make sure that we're doing it the GOG.com way: simple, easy, and it "just works." I'm not telling you guys to give up hope--we know how much you want this--but what I am saying is that this is harder to support than it might seem initially, and we're not ready to move to support Linux officially just yet.

PCG: You’ve just released a new catalog of Mac games on GOG. You and Valve are sort of moving into that space together, and Valve with Linux, too. Is any of that a response to the reception of Windows 8?

Trevor Longino: [Laughs] Well, there are things I can’t say about Windows 8 or else someone will drag me out back behind the Microsoft building and shoot me. But I will say, based on what I know, I know what people’s concerns are about Windows 8. And there are some very serious ones as far as releasing new games.

But from GOG’s point of view, Windows 8 gaming isn’t quite as scary as it is for other game outlets. But we mentioned at our conference that we’re working on Windows 8 support. The majority of games that work on Windows 7—I’m saying like 90% here—work on Windows 8. But we’re based on the release candidate build that was publicly available. And one, we don’t know what’s going to change in the final build—hopefully not much—and two, we don’t know what they might change in say, Service Pack 1. It may be they get really big pushback from the community. Not just developers that are concerned, but users who are saying, “I’m not gonna upgrade, this looks like rubbish.” So they may walk back some changes, in which case what we’ve been testing on might not be what ends up being the OS that you have available.

So, we have a plan in place for Windows 8. We will support it with the majority of our titles, I don’t doubt. But I will say that moving over to Mac gaming isn’t because we anticipate seeing more gamers thinking, “Hey, you know, this Windows 8 isn’t worth it, let me go see about Mac gaming.”

PCG: And Linux?

TL: Linux gaming is also something we’d love to do, but we haven’t made any announcements about it yet. We’ve been looking at it.

I’ve been making public statements for a while that there are technical hurdles. Steam’s approach is to say, “Here’s our distro, we support this distro. Have another distro? Sorry.” That’s not how GOG does things, we’re more free-range gaming. So we’re looking at how to deliver the GOG experience on— we can’t say every computer, because you can of course hook up an E Ink display with 2-color CGA as your monitor, use Lynx as your web browser, and run some weird Debian distro that you’ve custom modded to do just what you want and then say, “How come I can’t play your games?”

PCG: I’d love to play Fallout 2 on an E Ink display.

TL: Yeah, something like that? No, we won’t support it, obviously. But we want to try to get it where the majority of gamers, if they’re on Linux, will be able to get a game and expect it works. We haven’t found a solution, yet. We know there’s a big demand for it, just like we know everyone wants System Shock with 25 thousand votes. It’s tough, because the rights with System Shock are just a mess. Likewise, we know people want Linux games. And people are saying “You could just distribute the TAR and we’ll figure it out.” Sure, we could just distribute the DOS executables and just let the Windows users figure it out, but that’s not how we do business. So making that experience on Linux is a challenge and one that we’re trying to address.

i'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to linux, but, crazy idea here, what if gog.com comes up with their own linux distro instead? one they could have control over? i know it's likely impossible, but, if gog team is crazy enough to do it...could even be a major boost for linux popularity among gamers.

The newest post under the GOG Linux request. Interesting thought but likely even more effort that GOG doesn't want to/cannot put. What do you guys think?